- cypherpunks-legacy - lists.cpunks.org

Little ebanks -- a modest proposal.
by davidm＠iconz.co.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

[Executive Summary -- The author proposes a system of stamps for remailers as a way of starting up an ecash system. The stamps would be sold to the public as stamps, but be convertible by remailer operators into real money.] Hal, Many thanks for your comments. I'll try to make this less legalistically impenetrable. Despite the difficulties, I think anon corps are possible - and legal. What I was trying to stress is that they are expensive and inefficient: so you have to be really sure you want anonymity if you are going to use one. The hurdles to ecash seem more formidable. The problem with moving off shore and ignoring the SEC, for instance, is that your scheme loses some credibility. Since the value of ecash is (in the short term, at least) going to be based on the possibility of converting it into real cash (just as the value of real cash is based on the possibility of converting it into real things), a structure that operates outside the law makes that value doubtful. A large-scale rollout of ecash for the average Netscape user (and the people that service them) is going to need all the legitimacy it can muster. Perhaps, though, we can start small, and allow the forces of nature (greed, envy and, with a bit of luck, sloth) to take their course and scale a small scheme into a thriving e-economy. What I have in mind is a service that provides estamps (you knew there had to be an 'e' in there somewhere, didn't you) for use with remailers. Jo Anonymous buys stamps, sticks them on her messages, and the anon-remailers collect them. The remailer ops then get to cash the stamps in for actual money, so they can pay their ISPs and lawyers. At the heart of the scheme is a genuine (micro) ebank [a uebank?]. But, to avoid problems with offering securities to the public (and the SEC hassles etc), the ebank only sells estamps (little bits of ecash) to estamp- vendors. The estamp-vendors sell the stamps (with a mark-up?) to the public. [Perhaps using this new Netscape/Mastercard tie-in.] Because the estamp- vendors are only selling stamps (you can tell by the beautiful stamp-like gif-icons the vendor's Web page uses...) the SEC doesn't become involved. [I'm relying on the fact that the numbers involved are really small, and that the estamps *are* being sold for the purposes of postage. Perhaps the ebank and the vendor should be based off shore...] This scheme breaks the credibility issue into two -- a large number of people (anonymous remailer users) have to be convinced of something relatively trivial (that the remialer will accept the stamps); a small number of people (anonymous remailer operators) have to be convinced of something relatively important (that the stamps are exchangeable for cash). If the remailer operators are sufficiently involved in the scheme, this should work. One type of scalability comes when EITHER A. Someone sets up as a Data Haven token vendor (the tokens being bought from the ebank as slightly larger bits of ecash), and data haven operators start to accept the Tokens, in the knowledge they can swap them for real money; OR B. Data Haven operators start to accept estamps for their services, because they can swap them for cash; OR both. [The first scenario obviously disguises the appearance of ecash as a medium of exchange for a bit longer.] Another type of scalability comes when other people start uebanks, which then issue their own estamps/tokens/ecash to estamp/token vendors. If the new uebanks are as (provably) secure as the original(s), the uebanks could agree to clear each others' ecash and settle up at the end of the day (or some global equivalent - eg 12am GMT) using some kind of netting system. As long as everyone played nice at the beginning (all the remailer operators declared their estamp income etc ;-) the uebanks could go legit: and by backing their submissions to regulators with a proven record of service (no need to stress that the remailers were *anonymous*), by wearing Al Gore t-shirts and garbling about the I-way and electronic town halls, and by not letting Tim May and his contract killers near the place, it might just work. On the other hand, if the system is working well enough, there may be no need to go legit. (Although if I was an ebank operator I would be wary about entering into netting arrangements with an ebank the SEC etc could close down). [But is netting needed with online clearing? Perhaps this would only be useful across currencies...] With the ebanks in appropriate jurisdictions, operating in grey rather than obviously black areas (it is not so much that this stuff is being offered to the public as that the public is going out to *find* this stuff), with a proven track record in ponying up the cash, and with the approval of really cool people who get on the cover of Wired, Robin Public may not *need* any more assurance to par- ticipate in the e-economy. What R.P. *will* need is products. Most of the attempts at net-commerce I've seen concentrate on offering things that can be delivered to people, either physically (so that the Compuserve Electronic Mall is basically a mail order catalogue) or electronically (hence the rather sketchy descriptions of anonymous markets, usually falling back on the idea that, because this is the Information Age, consulting is the root of all value...), to be consumed now (this tin of coffee, that movie-on-demand, the other set of nanotech plans). But of course a lot of people (not, unfortunately, myself :-) have significant amounts of property that they do not consume right away. The possibility of anonymous investment (through eg anon corps) offers huge scope for the development of the e-economy. [I'll mention one statistic -- according to tax haven experts (Ginsberg, Spitz), in 1989 50% of all money processed internationally goes through tax havens.] After all, a capitalist economy (even an anarcho-capitalist economy) is built by capitalists, not wage slaves. More later (unless you plead real hard...) Cheers, David

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Netherlands crypto ban?
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

What's the update on the move to ban private crypto in Holland? Last I remember there were trial balloons, but nothing happened. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "In between the breaths is rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in the space where we live" rishab(a)arbornet.org - Lawrence Durrell Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Re: The Remailer Crisis
by rishab＠dxm.ernet.in 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Tim urges recently that we need to do something about the "remailer crisis." I remember Sameer once mentioning that he could set up remailer-in-a-box accounts for possibly anonymous 'sponsors' who'd be the legal owners therefore indemnifying Sameer (the tolerant sysadmin) of responsibility. I know he allows 'remail-to-yourself' blind-server accounts for $10 / meg or something. That's probably a bit expensive for a sponsor of a public remailer (any stats on average remailer traffic?). I never did here any more from sameer or anyone else about remailers-in-boxed-accounts. I for one would be willing to 'sponsor' a remailer account on any system with a small fee - I can't run my own as my private site looks at the world through PPP. I suggest that 'sponsored' remailers are a better way of making remailers economically viable for people like Sameer, who are the real, if not nominal, administrators. Though I hardly use remailers, those who do would probably make better (and more easily executed) use of their money if they sponsor remailer accounts on Cypherpunk ISPs like c2, rather than pay a (truenamed, legally vulnerable) operator for any single remailer. Sameer's blind-server code can come in use to make any link between the sponsor and her sponsored account very hard to detect. The advantages of sponsoring remailer-site operators to create remailing accounts, rather than pay an individual remailer operator, are many: 1. innocent until proven guilty - presumably sponsors do use remailers a lot; but not necessarily. So the payment transaction can be via truename, rather than via some complicated anonymous means, and still leave the sponsor unimplicated 2. legal - an operator of a single remailer is vulnerable - technically, if not root, and legally otherwise. an administrator of a Cypherpunk ISP is not, and does not have the legal right to monitor a customer's traffic, and with blind-servers even detailed logging don't lead back to the owner of an account, the sponsor, from any _specific_ remailer (though a pool of sponsors exist for a pool of remailer account) 3. technical - it's not possible to ban a single remailer, as they may be _many_ on a site. If the site is much more than just remailers, it's not really possible to ban the entire site. 4. traffic analysis - more remailers addresses will make traffic analysis harder, and chaining more fun - you could chain through multiple accounts on a single site with little loss in reliability (though you'll still want to go through more sites) 5. remailer explosion - more reliable remailers (due to the '-in-a-box', more users, wider distribution Comments? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rishab Aiyer Ghosh "In between the breaths is rishab(a)dxm.ernet.in the space where we live" rishab(a)arbornet.org - Lawrence Durrell Voice/Fax/Data +91 11 6853410 Voicemail +91 11 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA

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Spam Busters!
by Nathan Zook 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Yeah, the numbers should be higher. This was just a hypothetical! nzook(a)bga.com said: > There is little, if anything, we can do to stop a chained, PGP'ed mail > bomb, "This is mail bomb number XXX. Boom!" It is therefore in our best > interest to not encourage children to send such messages in such a way. I > believe Homer's message was erroneous for this reason. People, please! Before critisizing a method, look at the threat model! I plainly stated that my method was not intended to deal with real trouble. tcmay: "The From: line is notoriously misleading". But it still gives enough that we need remailers in the first place, right? The "From:" was a token. It wasn't meant as a literal. For id'ing postmaster, all you need is the xx.xx.xx.xx, right? jalicqui "Unless your remailer was the terminal remailer for a significant number.." But in a serious spam/mailbomb attack, someone would _have_ to get a bunch, right? With the changing session keys, and a chain, the best we could hope for would be to stop it on its way out. (or use for padding ;-) Incidently, a per/customer volume limit would also control the binaries. Since we have little hope of id'ing the true originator, we might have to limit a site. (bad) OTOH, if someone tried to send binaries, only to find that they couldn't get more than 1M out an hour, they would probably give up & go somewhere else. We might also hit the chained pgp bomber this way, as the messages would likely be fairly large? XXX But this all misses a point that I would like to stress. We are in what the military refers to as "low-intensity combat". Right now, we don't have a continuous stream of spam-bombs floating through our systems. (Well, we did, but jp shut down :-(( ) Right now, we (other than PRZ) don't have serious legal troubles. Right now, our remailers are too weak to be a significant problem to the TLAs (any more than a forged From:). The way to win a low-intensity battle is to avoid escalating unless you are sure you can win. Eventually, we will have to standardize packets. Eventually, we will have to employ very sophisticated techniques to deal with spam-bomb. But maybe we don't do that today. Maybe we do just enough to catch a bunch of the most juvenile. Then the next bunch is smarter. Then we catch them. We keep going. You see, I doubt that we can take on a spammer that knows the net as well as anyone here. But I don't doubt that word can get out that the remailers nail spammers. Of course, we risk becoming the latest challenge to the juvenile, but I think that this is far less likely than it appears at first because we are, after all, "really cool". My suggestion is to avoid, for as long as possible, letting on to _anyone_ just how sophisticated our systems are, just how much can be done, until we are sure we can win the unavoidable battles. XXX This also strongly points to per-line blocking of remailers. Since the necessary steps to catch a sUPer bomber appear to be impossible/ impractical, we must offer annon-blocking for those poor souls that request it. Perhaps annon-block for a month at a time. This is part of that PR that we need to watch. To put it another way, if our services make it easy(er) for someone to engage in an activity that we oppose, and that can hurt (subjective) someone else, we are facing a moral responsiblity for our actions. We should attempt to fulfill that responsibility. I believe that the phone company even allows people to change numbers for free if they are receiving harassing calls. And we want to be better though of than the phone company, right? XXX BTW, do you have to be a remailer operator to be on the list? If not, I'ld like to know how to subscribe... Finger or request keyserver for PGP 2.6.2 (tm) key. PGP<->Mail/News installation incomplete. Factors for modulous are not proven primes. Key may be far weaker than expected. Encode at your own risk. Key ID: 14712B4D 1994/12/26 Nathan H. Zook <nzook(a)bga.com> Key fingerprint = 44 B3 D8 66 3D 55 1E 2E F8 92 22 A6 33 8C DE 24 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBLyBfUHmgMs8UcStNAQE7Ygf/Wg5+hKErgpqi+4J7jOAw97AitUnYn+z+ QJqAw4ar6hQEY/taC6ru5S8YjKYHwmXdR7n7YjSFjEy8aYwXSr4SaALICNhQsyrU jcSuaMY0oUN2obYV6TxYtdVWaQVF9XBqW/8AlIcs+ZF4Yi7gqUdgf4aApuapW14e drVi6PgV5ccg8a+wGBCdJhDy5AK0BJRtxUxtLDeb+MkaTOfk/ylLfBdbFV1iK7Ek qDmpAZdd+FpwKoqBTm+jbCa/kemwFN5touLeLijRWjEuoqFK0x/YYRYsAjJUNqu/ Qt6YWqvat8t7UYlTauVsQ/9XJNxADxmWlrKaaQTxmsHrobq0h4s+RA== =ykck -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Purshottam
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>----- Forwarded message (Andrew Purshottam <andy(a)eon.netcom.com>) -----< Dear Mr. Purshottam, Mail to <andy(a)eon.netcom.com> boings.

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Re: IRS to keep unreviewable secret dossiers on US citizens
by pstemari＠erinet.com 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 12:44 PM 1/20/95 CST, xpat(a)vm1.spcs.umn.edu wrote: >Excerpts from : St Paul Pioneer Press, Jan 29, 1995 > >"IRS plans to collect more data on individuals to nab tax cheats" [...] Here's the text from the recent EPIC annoucement on this--it covers the exemption the IRS is claiming from the FOIA in a bit more detail (sorry if people have already seen this): ======================================================================= [6] IRS Initiates Massive New Database ======================================================================= On December 20, the Internal Revenue Service announced in the Federal Register that it was planning a new database to monitor compliance of taxpayers in a project entitled Compliance 2000. The database would contain information on all individuals in the U.S. who conduct certain financial transactions and would be segmented by different criteria: Any individual who has business and/or financial activities. These may be grouped by industry, occupation, or financial transactions, included in commercial databases, or in information provided by state and local licensing agencies. The new database will combine private and public sector databases in a single searchable entity. A number of federal financial databases from the IRS will be enhanced with state, local and commercial sources. The Federal Register notice describes the non-tax databases: Examples of other information would include data from commercial databases, any state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), credit bureaus, state and local real estate records, commercial publications, newspapers, airplane and pilot information, U.S. Coast Guard vessel registration information, any state's Department of Natural Resources information, as well as other state and local records. In addition, Federal government databases may also be accessed, such as, federal employment files, federal licensing data, etc. Finally, even though the proposed system would use frequently inaccurate "commercial databases" such as direct marketing records, taxpayers would not be able to review their records to ensure that they are accurate and up to date: "This system is exempt from the access and contest provisions of the Privacy Act." EPIC is filing comments asking the IRS to reconsider its use of commercial databases and to ensure that there are greater safeguards on the collection and use of personal information. A copy of the Federal Register notice is available at cpsr.org /cpsr/privacy/epic/IRS_compliance_2000_notice_txt Comments on the proposed system must be received by January 19, 1995, and sent to Office of Disclosure, Internal Revenue Service, 1111 Conn. Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20224. EPIC's Comments are available at cpsr.org /cpsr/privacy/epic/epic_irs_compliance_2000_comments.txt --Paul J. Ste. Marie pstemari(a)well.sf.ca.us, pstemari(a)erinet.com

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Re: Why emoney? Why not a web of debt?
by jrochkin＠cs.oberlin.edu 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

At 6:54 PM 01/20/95, anonymous-remailer(a)shell.portal.com wrote: > But electronic computers are good at checking out these kinds of >chains automatically. Suppose there were a web of debt-trust. Each >person would indicate the other people who's iou's they will accept >(and the amount they would be willing to take). Thus I might take (up >to $10 of) Jo's, who might take Carol's who might take Terry's, etc. > > To buy something from me online, you will need to produce an IOU >from Jo, Carol or Terry. I would hand it to Jo for verification. Jo >would accept it or reject it (perhaps after talking to some other >folks online). If it were a CarolIOU, or a TerryIOU I would insist Jo >trade it for a JoIOU. All the details could be hidden behind a nice >little GUI. Certainly, that's what money is after all. Pretty much. But how are you going to transfer these IOUs electronically in a way that is relatively fraud-proof? Digital money. Ecash. When we say "ecash", we're talking about what Chaum was writing about in whatever paper, what Schneier describes protocols for in AC. Maybe the ecash is redeemable in US dollars, or maybe it's redeemable for 10 units of service from Jon Smith, but an ecash protocol is what you are going to use to transfer and issue those digital certificates of value, whatever the value represents. And of course, if you want to use these certificates of value anonymously, which is what is required to pay for an anon remailer, there are some slightly more stringent requirements. The right kind of ecash protocol can still handle it. But Carol probably shouldn't be paying for a remailer in CarolBucks (or CarolIOUs, whatever), at least not unless Carol is such a big spender that CarolBucks are in wide circulation and used by lots of people other then Carol. Which I guess is possible in your system. A pseudo-anarchist non-state-supported debt system would work fine, but you still need a mechanism to transfer your certificates of value, whether they stand for ten U.S. dollars, or 10 hours that Jon Smith will work mowing your lawn. And another way to look at it is that you are just proposing an ecash system where every person issues their own ecash, instead of just a few central banks doing it. There are advantages and disadvantages to that sort of thing, and it might be something interesting to think about, but you ultimately aren't going to be able to do it over a computer network without ecash. Ecash is the way you represent value certificates in digital form, pretty much.

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Re: Why emoney? Why not a web of debt?
by davidm＠iconz.co.nz 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

>At 6:54 PM 01/20/95, anonymous-remailer(a)shell.portal.com wrote: >> But electronic computers are good at checking out these kinds of >>chains automatically. Suppose there were a web of debt-trust. Each >>person would indicate the other people who's iou's they will accept >>(and the amount they would be willing to take). > >Certainly, that's what money is after all. Pretty much. But how are you >going to transfer these IOUs electronically in a way that is relatively >fraud-proof? Digital money. Ecash. [...] > And another way to look at it is that you are just proposing an >ecash system where every person issues their own ecash, instead of just a >few central banks doing it. The question of how to value ecash issued by different entities of varied credit-worthiness is an interesting one. I had been thinking along the lines of one or more centralised (but independent) credit rating agencies (a la Standard and Poors or Moodys) that one would subscribe to. Then you would value the various edollars in terms of their credit rating -- so you might sell something for $4 of CyberCash (NA) BV ecash, or $5 of FliBiNite NL ecash and so on. But of course, since ecash is worth only what you can get for it, the web of trust model, since it reflects what people will give for it, seems to reflect that underlying value much better. The best way to underpin the value of ecash is for the issuer to (credibly) undertake to convert it into real money. This gets around the problem of no one on the net making enough things you want: the old 'you can't eat cyberspace' saw. McDonalds may not accept ecash, but if a simple trip to the relevant ebank's Web page can put the price of a Big Mac in your real-money account, that is only a timing problem. [Of course, you have to come out from behind the anonymous ecash shield to do that, but that is a problem of being a real person. If you want to keep your wealth anonymous, don't buy a flash car and the latest Monet to go on sale -- invest it in an anonymous corporation.] An ebank along these lines could be set up reasonably cheaply (apart from the technical hurdles ;-), and could easily scale up as needed, and migrate to safer (taxhaven/banking secrecy) jurisdictions when turnover etc warranted it. David

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Remailers-in-a-box
by Greg Broiles 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Tim May wrote: > I am waiting for such services to be actually, formally, solidly > announced, not just casual remarks that it might be possible. And of > course the software should be "ready to wear," port-a-potty, so that > the remailer account owner does nothing more than pay for the account. In this model, who deals with mailbombs/spams/requests for address blocks? It is this sort of administrivia (plus the threat of liability) that makes running a remailer troublesome, not a lack of someone's $20/month. I think it's disingenuous to say that "X pays the bills for the network link; X purchased the hardware and keeps it running; the box is in X's house/office; X is the person who reads complaint mail and responds (or fails to); but because Y sends X $20/month, the remailer (and attendant liability for its mis/use) belongs to Y." I realize that there's a certain formal logic to it, but I don't think that anyone - not courts, and not the world-in-general - is going to pay attention to that formalism when it's clear that a machine essentially under the control of X is being used for 'antisocial' means. I'm seriously considering offering this sort of remailer-in-a-box thing, but there's a certain amount of hassle associated with running a remailer. It can be shifted to different parties, but it must be paid for one way or another. I guess it'd be possible to treat remailers as disposable - when one had pissed off enough people, it could be abandoned - but this lack of long-term reliability seems poor. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLyBjVX3YhjZY3fMNAQEI3QP/YdqBbhn5k4Q+NtD3zoJCG7qIfGaQqogH AFFmItuU46rFQHHSxPl+p4fNmX+32yEva04ORq28NWPKggXiXhwN+LQDshWomSU8 gXkysIPdGeogSDxP6+JxXatE81TpuCjOtbGH3KlmCNaRbB0685zBVB7Oj1O/D5it zqM9JuV8yAE= =EQY5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Remailer In a Box available for beta testing
by sameer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

I finally got annoyed with Tim clamoring for a Remailer in a Box, so I set it up just now... I just wrote it so there may be some problems I haven't gotten rid of yet. If you want to run a remailer on c2.org: 1) Sign up for a shell account on http://www.c2.org/services/signup.html 2) Log into your account (via dialup [510-549-1383] or telnet [c2.org] once it has been created. (within a day.. I'll automate account creation so it gets made within an hour soon, but right now I am doing it manually.) 3) If you wish, you can setup a .forward file to point to mailfilters or to another account. 4) Run the program /usr/local/lib/boxed-remailer/install_remail. The remailer will be installed, and non-remailed mail will be acted upon according to how the account was setup before you ran the program. 5) Answer the questions, they should be pretty simple. Once an account is created there is a one week free grace period. If you'd like to continue the account you can pay for it. If you have problems and suggestions, make sure you mail me, and I'll fix it. This is still in beta testing, so if you have problems I won't disable the account waiting for payment until the problems are fixed. $10 for one month, $27 for 3 months, $45 for 6 months. -- sameer Voice: 510-841-2014 Network Administrator Pager: 510-321-1014 Community ConneXion: The NEXUS-Berkeley Dialin: 510-549-1383 http://www.c2.org (or login as "guest") sameer(a)c2.org

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